The Closet

He traces the divided self back to eighth grade, when, as an unwaveringly good Catholic altar boy, a Boy Scout, the son of a nurse and a Marine drill instructor, he needed to understand his thrilling journey to "the last gate on the farthest pasture of gay sexual exploration" with a skinny seventh grader he knew from school. He was terriﬁed of his own willing, eager, desperate participation in the sex. But there was no one to talk to about it. He didn't know anyone who was gay; back then there was no one even on TV except maybe Liberace and probably Uncle Arthur on Bewitched. So he went to the Woodbridge Public Library, only to ﬁnd that "homosexuality" wasn't even in the card catalog. Eventually, he found what he was looking for under "Sexuality, deviant."

"I was like, whoa, this isn't good," he says. "This is not a bandwagon I want to get on. I need to end it, I need to reverse it. Is this a phase? Is this temporary? Is this psychological? How did I absorb this thing? I've got to expunge this from my system." He bought Playboy magazines and tried masturbating. He locked himself away, vowed to win this war.

He lost. In high school and college and law school, he had sex with men—scores of men—but dated women, advancing the straight-guy image that he believed his planned political future was dependent upon. The anonymous sex in New York with the losers in the sex shops was decidedly less satisfying than the anonymous sex in D.C., in the alley behind the synagogue on the corner of Sixth and I Streets. Now, those guys, those guys wore suits, and they had wedding rings—they had their lives beautifully bracketed. He often went two and three times a week.

So it was: Columbia, Georgetown Law School, Harvard School of Education, assistant county prosecutor by 24, state assemblyman by 32, mayor of Woodbridge by 34, and New Jersey state senator at 36. His rise was as swift as it seemed inevitable. He was charming. He was a workaholic. He was driven. But even back then, people wondered what, if anything, was beneath the ambition. Newspapers during his bid for governorship asked if he was anything more than an empty suit. There was a sense that he was somehow slippery, "eerily hollow," that there was probably a lot more to the guy than he was letting on.

At 34 he married Kari Schutz, a librarian he met on a cruise ship, and had a daughter, Morag. They split up four years later, ostensibly because she couldn't handle the rigors of political life. To this day, he insists that she never knew he was gay. But by then he was already living a double life—secretly gay, publicly a straight God-fearing guy who sure as heck needed a beautiful wife and daughter to complete the look. He had learned to live with a divided self.

"You begin to think, which is the ultimate act of hubris, that you can manage it," he tells me, his eyes widening, his face opening. "I mean, so now I'm the master of my own universe!"

It became the perfect asset for a man with designs on the White House. "Because what happens in American politics?" he says. "You portray an image, and then you poll that image, and then you determine, does the public ﬁnd it credible?"

He repeats this point several times, making sure I get it loud and clear: He was terriﬁcally good at deceiving people, and deceiving people is exactly the way to win in politics. Isn't that terrible? Isn't he terrible? He was so terrible. Watch him now: He's gonna punch himself in the face. He wants you to know he sinned, and sinned bad. He wants you to know that he knows what a terrible person he was—taking preemptive strike after preemptive strike until you catch yourself thinking, Aww.

I ask him why he resigned as governor. Could he not have claimed his sexuality and remained a public servant, become an authentic public servant, a leader legitimately qualiﬁed to advance the cause of human rights?

"If it had happened differently," he says, "if I had had the courage, which I didn't, to say, 'This is who I am,' I think I could've done it. But the difficulty was the circumstances against which this arose. It was, you know, well…"

Blackmail?

McGreevey claims that Cipel threatened to sue him for sexual harassment, demanding $5 million to keep quiet. (According to Cipel's lawyers, the idea for hush money was McGreevey's, and a subsequent investigation turned up no evidence of extortion.) No one ever quite bought the sexual-
harassment story—or Cipel's simultaneous denial of his own homosexuality, which indeed seems curious, if even a portion of McGreevey's account is true. If not for a love affair, why would McGreevey have hired him in the ﬁrst place? He had few qualiﬁcations for the job. McGreevey's version of the story was always the more believable one, if only because it was plenty damning all on its own: The governor had a secret gay lover.

"It was a mess," I offer.

"A mess," he says.

If McGreevey's welcome into the gay community has been lukewarm, it's because his coming out was not voluntary, was not about personal integrity or some courageous sudden realization, but rather about being forced out, trapped, a cornered mouse. He admits he would have never come out were it not for Golan forcing him to fold. He would have gone to his deathbed as a closeted gay man.